Are we not men?: Listening for answers in Island of Lost Souls and Kuroneko

From its opening apparition of a derelict ship emerging from a fog to its magnificent climactic images of beast-men rising up to exact revenge on their self-proclaimed creator, Island of Lost Souls (1932), photographed by Karl Struss—who won the first Oscar for his enduringly haunting work on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929)—is a feast of spectacle that veers between the seductive and the grotesque. Beautifully wrought visions of land, sea and laboratory intermingle with close-ups of fire-lit faces and feline hands both delicate and claw-like, desperate to feel the warmth of a very confused castaway whose sexual desire is unknowingly drawing him closer to bestiality.

But the image that lingers with me most after watching the film, late on a chilly October night, is modest in comparison: that of a single, very hairy, pointed ear. What makes this image so memorable for me is that not only is it the first sign that something terribly strange is transpiring—a foreshadowing elegantly echoed more than 50 years later in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)—but it is also a sort of mute instruction for all of us watching: listen. Among the shrewder choices made by director Erle C. Kenton and/or his collaborators in post-production was that of using Arthur Johnston and Sigmund Krumgold’s musical score, wonderful as it is, very sparingly. The film’s celebrated atmospherics are perfected by the absence of music to soften the agonized cries of those titular souls subjected to ongoing torture in the bluntly dubbed “House of Pain.” Those cries help make Island of Lost Souls a genuinely horrific horror movie. It was those cries I kept hearing as I tried to fall asleep.

The story, for those who don’t know, comes from H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, adapted here by Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young. It follows the ship-wrecked Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) as he’s rescued and then abandoned by a drunken sea captain on an island without a name, where mad scientist Moreau (the gloriously go-for-broke Charles Laughton) has been vivisecting his way through the animal kingdom in search of the genes that he believes urges all animals to ascend to the traits of man. Moreau lives surrounded by mutants—one played by Bela Lugosi—mostly very hairy humanoids who wear pants and rally round campfires nightly to chant out the dictates of their patriarchal, neo-colonialist master. But there is also one Lota (Kathleen Burke), the “Panther Woman,” whom Moreau, presumably unable to mate with her himself, hopes to pimp out and toss into his muddying gene pool with Parker.

It’s unlikely Island of Lost Souls would have been made just a couple of years later when the Production Code was more strictly enforced, though the film’s explicit exploration of evolutionary mayhem and trans-species lust still managed to get it banned in the UK for 25 years. These days torture has somehow been domesticated as screen “entertainment,” but Moreau’s distinctive shadow still looms over the imagination. Wells’ Moreau had to move his experiments off the grid and away from prying eyes; today he’d more likely be enjoying a brilliant career in bio-mechanics, a visionary helping to shape our post-human future. The real horror has, it seems, already started to come true.

Criterion’s exceptionally well-compiled release features their freakiest menu since Videodrome (1983); interviews with the guys from Devo, who incorporated Island into the band’s conceptual framework and helped immortalize the line, “Are we not men?”; an interview with David J. Skal regarding Wells in Hollywood; yet another excellent, bouncy, info-crammed audio commentary from Golden Age horror historian Gregory Mank; and, perhaps most fascinating, an interview with Richard Stanley, co-scenarist and original director of the infamous 1996 Island adaptation with Marlon Brando.


Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), which Criterion released last week, is set during the Sengoku period, a time of seemingly endless war. The film begins with a horde of starved samurai entering a very modest abode inhabited by two women, the mother (Nobuko Otowa) and wife (Kei Sato) of a young man (Kichiemon Nakamura) who was conscripted into the army of a local warlord. The samurai consume all available food, rape the women and set their home on fire before disappearing into the grove from which they emerged.

The brutality of this sequence—not unlike many sequences in Island of Lost Souls—is intensified greatly by what is absent from the soundtrack. There is no dialogue whatsoever for the first ten minutes of Kuroneko, but the glances exchanged by the women and the invaders prompt you to steel yourself, and the image, manifesting only moments later, of the women’s bodies as they lay in the ashes of what was once their home—their cadavers soon approached by some rather curious cats—is both chilling and possessive of a spectral beauty that will return throughout the course of this elegant, unsettling ghost story riddled with vicious revenge and perverse reversals.

Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) scared the bejesus out of me when I saw Criterion’s release of it some years back, and Kuroneko wields a similar primal power, much of it deriving from carefully crafted details: a house that seems like a theatre of mist designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the kimono who’s outer diaphanous layer resembles the wings of a fly; the peculiar use of slow-motion or the breath that hangs in the frigid air. The script was founded on a Japanese folktale, yet it holds extra resonance due to Shindo’s class-conscious subtext. The film’s influence can be found everywhere in more recent Japanese horror films, though it received a negligent release in North America in its day. Metro Cinema screened it back in August and Criterion’s deluxe treatment should secure it the much wider audience it deserves. See it when it’s dark out. But listen carefully, too.

Earwitness to an assassination: Blow Out

Jack (John Travolta) is a sound-effects technician, and thus a gifted listener, which might be another way of saying he’s a born aural voyeur, if you will. Blow Out (1981), Brian De Palma’s conspiracy thriller, continues a rich tradition, following Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), which was inspired by Cortázar’s story ‘Las babas del diablo’ (1959), and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), in that it hinges on its protagonist’s special ability to perceive an incriminating detail hidden in a recording. The inciting incident: Jack’s perched on a bridge in a park at night in search of some good wind. Wearing headphones, handling a baton-like microphone, he captures not just wind in the trees, but also a whispering couple, an owl, and, fatefully, a car skidding off a road and plunging into the river. Jack rushes to help. He can’t save the driver but manages to rescue the driver’s lovely young companion (Nancy Allen). Later, in emergency, he’s told that the driver was a popular presidential candidate. He’s also told there was no lovely young companion, or rather, he’s told that the companion will simply be erased from the official record, just as Jack might excise a single track from a soundscape. Furthermore, Jack’s told that a certain noise he heard (and recorded) just a second before the accident never occurred, a noise that sounded like a gunshot.

Blow Out navigates the elusive bridge that divides authenticity and artifice: a bridge built on technology. This theme is cleverly integrated right into the film’s opening sequence, when a screening of an excerpt from Jacks’ current project, the exploitation slasher film-within-the-film, could initially be mistaken for the film itself. It’s interrupted only when one of the slasher’s naked nubile victims lets out a scream that doesn’t sound authentic enough and the producer calls the screening to a halt. (Amusingly, the producer tries to find a more authentic scream by bringing pairs of young women into the studio: one screams into a microphone while the other pulls her hair.) Jack knows the woman was in the car; he knows there were two sharp sounds: first the gunshot, then the blow out. But he has to get someone to believe him, to listen as he listens. We in the audience know there’s no ambiguity or paranoia here: we know Jack’s telling the truth because, unlike The Conversation, Blow Out doesn’t adhere exclusively to its protagonist’s subjective experience. De Palma breaks away from Jack on several occasions to follow John Lithgow’s misogynistic hired killer with a penchant for strangling his victims with wire. (A playful linguistic doubling: Travolta and Lithgow each possess their own kind of potentially lethal “wire.”)

Blow Out is the most compelling De Palma film I’ve seen. Its camerawork, courtesy of Vilmos Zsigmond, is relentlessly inventive; it’s heightened red-and-blue-all-over production design (perhaps substituting film noir’s black and white with a punchier sort of monochromatic palate) makes for weirdly fascinating eye candy; and its obsessive replaying of Jack’s recording of the assassination, along with its cluttered mechanical milieu of tape, reels and buttons, is engrossing. I have several reservations, yet thinking about them makes me want to watch Blow Out again (something that Criterion’s velvety-gorgeous new DVD and Blu-ray editions make that much more tempting). Travolta is young, beautiful, and gives a focused, nuanced performance, yet his character feels inadequately shaded, less implicated in the story’s darkness. Yes, Jack’s got a guilty conscience about an undercover police gig that went horribly wrong, yet this shadowy past doesn’t resonate in his presence. It feels oddly incidental. Meanwhile De Palma’s use of split screens, process shots, variable speeds and 360-degree pans become increasingly leaden, and Pino Donaggio’s cartoony score thwarts at least as many moments of intimacy or suspense as it enhances.

I know many have tremendous affection for De Palma, fellow critics especially (“Paulettes” most especially). Yet there’s something in his approach that consistently pushes me out. His work deserves scrutiny on a film-by-film basis, but I’ll offer one generalization. Whenever De Palma unfurls his more expensive, grandiose set pieces, whether in Blow Out or The Untouchables (1987) or The Black Dahlia (2006), when everything slows to a crawl and every frame is so conspicuously composed, I inevitably feel as though I’ve been asked to sit through an over-rehearsed audition. There’s a strange thinness to these sequences (not unlike the thinness that plagues certain De Palma characters). De Palma’s frequently taken to task for cynicism or irony, but the way he crafts such sequences strikes me as nakedly earnest. He suddenly wants genuine opera, and it feels awkward. Yet in the case of Blow Out the big set pieces hardly spoil things overall, and the quieter bits (that inciting incident especially) are eloquent and highly memorable. So if you happen to share some of my frustrations with De Palma, do see this one. It’s looking an awful lot like his masterpiece.